The Alibaba office building in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, China, on Aug. 28, 2024.
CFOTO | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Alibaba shares fell on Thursday after the Chinese e-commerce giant missed earnings expectations for its fiscal fourth quarter on both the top and bottom line.
Shares were down 5% in premarket trade in the U.S. at 6:02 a.m. ET.
Here’s how Alibaba did in its fiscal fourth quarter ended March versus LSEG estimates:
Revenue: 236.5 billion Chinese yuan ($32.6 Billion), versus 237.2 billion yuan expectedNet income: 12.4 billion yuan, compared 24.7 billion expected.
While falling short of analyst expectations, revenue was nevertheless up 7% year-on-year.
Alibaba’s net income was also still 279% higher year-on-year, off a low base. Alibaba said it saw some losses as a result of the disposal of some of its subsidiaries, which was offset by an increase in income from operations and changes to valuations of its equity investments.
However, analysts were hoping the company’s investments in artificial intelligence and its core e-commerce business would help it hit or exceed high expectations.
But Alibaba is grappling with macroeconomic volatility that has affected consumer sentiment in China. Washington’s trade war with Beijing has created uncertainty in the world’s second-largest economy, which has seen huge tariffs slapped from both sides during the latest quarter in which Alibaba reported.
Beijing and Washington agreed to suspend most tariffs on each other’s goods this month.
Alibaba’s core Taobao and Tmall group division — the company’s China e-commerce business — saw revenue rise 9% to 101.4 billion yuan. That growth rate is faster than the level seen in the previous quarter. Customer management revenue, which Alibaba makes off of selling marketing and other services to merchants on its platform, jumped 12% year-on-year. This is a big revenue driver for the company.
Over the last few months, China has also introduced policies to spur consumption and consumer purchases.
In a move to boost purchases on its Tmall and Taobao platforms, Alibaba extended a partnership with Rednote, or Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like service in China. The deal allows Taobao links to be embedded in Rednote posts, so users can be taken directly to a product shopping page.
On the earnings call on Thursday, Alibaba management said that the company would be investing “aggressively” in its so-called “instant commerce” model. This is a feature introduced on Taobao this month that provides deliveries of certain products in China within an hour, underscoring Alibaba’s bid to continue to differentiate itself from its rivals.
Alibaba executives said the hope is that will drive more engagement on the Taobao app.
Even with these changes, Alibaba is facing an intense price war in China with rivals including PDD and JD.com.
Cloud growth accelerates
Alibaba said cloud revenue totaled 30.1 billion yuan in the March quarter, increasing at a year-on-year pace of 18% — faster than the growth seen in the previous quarter.
The company said this was driven by “faster public cloud revenue growth” and by “increasing adoption of AI-related products.”
Investors are also focused on Alibaba’s efforts in artificial intelligence, where it has become a leading player domestically and globally.
In April, the Hangzhou-headquartered company launched the latest version of its open source large language model, Qwen 3, which is being used to power Alibaba’s AI assistant Quark.
AI competition in China is red hot and was exacerbated by DeepSeek’s innovative model launched earlier this year. Chinese tech giant Tencent meanwhile on Tuesday announced a 91% year-on-year rise in capital expenditures in the first quarter, driven by investments in AI.
Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu said in an earnings release that AI-related product revenue achieved “triple-digit growth for the seventh consecutive quarter.” Wu did not specify a figure for AI-related revenue.
During the earnings call on Thursday, Wu said companies are shifting toward cloud-based AI services. He said the company sees a “significant growth track for revenue” for Alibaba’s cloud business for the next few quarters.
“We have quite strong confidence and conviction in that,” Wu said, according to a company provided live translation of his comments.
